It’s not often you get a public official to speak this frankly: “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” That was John Sandweg, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement until a few weeks ago, speaking to the Los Angeles Times earlier this week. His observation helps explain the apparent conflict between the deportation claims of the Obama administration and those of its critics. In a nutshell, immigration officials have been ordered to essentially ignore illegal aliens in the interior of the country (whose removal is what people think of when they hear “deportations”) and instead are increasingly counting as deportations the return of people arrested at the border.

Security Debrief is a blog dedicated to homeland security, terrorism and counter-terrorism, intelligence and law enforcement that provides context to the debates, policies and politics that are playing out in Washington, D.C.